This has been either a bad week for Israel, or a great week for Israel, depending on whom you ask or what your Twitter feed looks like. In the end, this may matter more for the relevance and impact of Middle East studies than anything else.
* I have changed the title as I got plenty of pushback on twitter--that there is plenty of IR on Pandemics, not just in the major journals. And I will add an update at the bottom later to address...
This is a guest post from Jeffrey C. Isaac and William Kindred Winecoff who both teach political science at Indiana University, Bloomington Last Wednesday the two of us circulated an open letter...
As the world rushes to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, international relations scholars have a lot to say. We are not public health experts, or pathologists. But we can speak to the way states...
It’s getting to be that time of year again – the time when a fresh not-so-fresh crop of ABDs/PhDs gear-up for the academic job market. I’ve been there – it can make even the most self-assured academic have an existential crisis.[1] As much as I hated being on the job market myself, I absolutely love looking up and providing job market advice for students at Mizzou. I think I received especially good advice when I was a grad student and I think the advice I received has been causally related to my present situation (which I love). I’d like to “pay it forward.” On my first day as DGS, I...
Last night, I posted this about sexism in political science. It has gotten a pretty strong response getting 10x as many hits (so far) as my usual post, lots of retweets by female political scientists, and some sharing on facebook. The sharing on facebook came with props as my female political science friends were happy to see a senior male political scientist talk bluntly about this. These props/kudos made me feel squishy because it is not that hard to blog and notice on occasion that there is sexism in the poli sci business (as it is everywhere as one FB friend noted). My female...
I never thought that when I started grad school I’d be relocating to another country. Then again, when I got the job in Canada, it did not really occur to me that I was “really” leaving the US – on my previous visits to Toronto, everything felt pretty familiar. Plus, as a scholar of transnational activism, borders were supposed to be made increasingly irrelevant. I still remember the moment the border agent stamped my passport and glued the work permit into its folds. I had actually crossed a border for my job – politically, socially, and culturally. While many things are the same,...
The following is a guest post by Andrew Yeo at Catholic University of America. Collaborating with friends, colleagues, and other scholars is a great motivator for research. But if you’re at a small research university with limited institutional resources, the hurdles to do collaborative research beyond co-authoring is higher. Small departments, limited budgets, the absence of relevant research centers/programs, and few ongoing sponsored research activities ultimately makes it harder for junior scholars to learn how to organize larger collaborative research projects. If this sounds like your...
For the past two years, Jon Monten, Jordan Tama, and I have been working with the survey team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (Dina Smeltz and Craig Kafura) to revive the leader surveys that the Council used to run alongside their foreign policy opinion surveys of the American public. Because of the expense and the difficulties of getting responses, the Council discontinued those surveys in 2004, leaving academics with really limited options for comparing public and elite attitudes. With the release of a Council report and a recent piece ($, DM me for a PDF) in Foreign Affairs, we...
After you have seen the fall foliage at ISS-ISAC, why not see beautiful St. Louis, MO in November? ISA-Midwest - my FAVORITE conference - is November 19th - 22nd. Deadline for submissions is July 1st. This is a great conference for those interested in foreign policy or human rights themes. It's also a very inviting conference for junior scholars with lots of professional development opportunities. Hope to see you there - I'll join you for a drink at the amazing Three Sixty Bar.
Charli and I, along with a few other colleagues here in the Five Colleges are hosting this year's joint annual conference of the International Security Studies Section and International Security and Arms Control Section of ISA and APSA. The conference will be held Oct. 8 - 10 -- fall break weekend and peak fall foliage in New England! The conference theme is Global Trends in War and Political Violence. Over the past century, we have witnessed episodes of extreme interstate and intrastate violence as well as periods of relative stability and decline in war and armed conflict. We're looking...
The following is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. What constitutes important political science research? This question has been much discussed lately in connection with “When Contact Changes Minds: An Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality,” an article by Michael J. LaCour and Donald P. Green published in Science magazine. The reason for the attention is straightforward: because the piece was apparently based on fraudulent data, the article has become a veritable scandal. In the...